How to Maximize Your Marketing Budget in 4 Easy Steps

August 6, 2024 Jenna Cyprus

At 45 years old, as an already highly successful entrepreneur and business owner, Kevin O’Leary sold his company to the Mattel Toy Company for an astonishing $3.7 billion. It was one of the largest deals ever made in the software industry. But it wasn’t just that one deal that helped him build the empire he has today. Since then, he’s taken a unique view of his money and how he spends, invests, and leverages the financial resources he has. And whenever he invests in businesses on the popular show, Shark Tank, he operates out of this mindset.

“Here’s how I think of my money — as soldiers — I send them out to war every day. I want them to take prisoners and come home, so there’s more of them,” O’Leary says.

In other words, when he spends his money, he works hard to maximize the value of every single dollar to ensure he’s getting the best possible ROI.

Unfortunately, for most business owners and marketers, this is a foreign concept. We spend out of a sense of hopefulness that we’ll generate a positive ROI, but – truth be told – we don’t treat the dollars in our budgets like the little soldiers that they are.

According to research by HubSpot, businesses should spend about two to five percent of their revenue on marketing. But not every dollar spent brings the same return. However, by carefully planning how and where you spend your marketing budget, you can maximize the value you create and, in turn, generate more revenue and beefier profit margins.

How to Make the Most of Your Marketing Budget

In order to ensure your company’s financial “soldiers” come back alive (and with more captives), you have to be strategic with how you approach your budget. There are literally hundreds of different marketing platforms, channels, strategies, and tools you could use. But you need to silence the noise and focus on the ones that are most likely to generate a positive ROI for your business.

With this in mind, here are some suggestions

1.Know Your Audience

Always start with your customers. Whether you’re a brand new startup or you’ve been in business for decades, you need to know who you’re talking to. If you don’t understand your audience, you might as well be throwing your money to the wind.

Begin by identifying your ideal customer.

Who are they?
What do they like?
What problems are they facing?
What solutions are they already using?
What do they like about the solutions they’re using?
What do they dislike about the solutions they’re using?

Armed with this information, you can determine the best way to frame your products and services so that customers understand how you’re able to solve their biggest problems or help them accomplish their greatest desires.

Sounds great and all…but where do you start? There are endless options, but in the spirit of simplicity, here are some ways to get a better grip on who you’re talking to:

Run surveys and interviews for direct feedback. More than likely, this will require you to incentivize your customers in one way or another. People generally aren’t super enthusiastic about filling out surveys and feedback forms, so get creative with ways to motivate them to do so. If you’ve never read the book Ask by author and entrepreneur Ryan Levesque, you may want to study up on his method. It’s a good system for gathering feedback from customers.
Check out analytics tools that show visitor behavior patterns. More specifically, use website analytics tools that allow you to carefully study your closest competitors’ traffic, engagement, referring domains, search ads, and keywords. Because when you understand your most successful competitors, you’ll have a much better understanding of your own audience and how you can reach them effectively.
Engage with them on social media and listen to their opinions and concerns. People will spout off on social media. They’ll tell people what they really think about brands, products, services, and their own pain points. It’s smart to go from just listening to these people to actually engaging with them and proactively gathering feedback.

2. Prioritize the Right Channels

With so many marketing channels out there, it can be tempting to try to be everywhere at once. But spreading yourself too thin can lead to poor results. Instead, focus on the channels that your audience uses the most.

For example, if your audience spends a lot of time on Instagram, put more of your budget into creating engaging posts and ads on that specific platform. If they prefer reading blogs, invest in content creation and SEO to drive traffic to your website. If they overwhelmingly consume content by watching rather than reading, then a YouTube marketing strategy may be your best option. Whatever it is, the key is to prioritize the channels that will give you the best return on investment.

While social media is the “golden child” of marketing at the moment, don’t forget about other tried and true staples. Email marketing, for example, is still one of the highest ROI marketing channels in existence. On average, it brings in $36 for every one dollar spent.

Remember, it’s better to do a few things well than to do many things poorly. By concentrating your efforts on the right channels, you’ll be able to reach your audience more effectively and make your marketing budget go further.

3. Create Magnetic Content

Content has and always will be king in the world of marketing. But not just any content will do. In order to stand out in today’s crowded, noisy, over-saturated world of content, you need to grab attention and keep your audience engaged. This requires you to move beyond the basic, generic content that most brands are pushing out there and to actually create stuff that people care about.

Think about what your audience cares about.

What are their pain points?
What kind of content do they find helpful or entertaining?
What kind of content are they going to gravitate toward when they’re waiting in line at Starbucks and have three minutes to kill?

Whether it’s blog posts, videos, social media shorts, or emails, your content should provide real value. People need to walk away feeling like they’ve gained something (whether that’s knowledge, helpful advice, or even just encouragement).

4. Measure and Optimize Everything

Finally, you need to measure the results of your marketing efforts. This step is critically important, because it tells you what’s working and what’s not. Without this information, you’re just guessing. (And, if we’re being honest, most marketers skip this step, which is why their “soldiers” never come back home.)

Using tools like Google Analytics, email marketing reports, and native social media analytics platforms, you can track your performance over time and get a feel for how your various campaigns are performing. Look at metrics like website traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, and social media engagement. These numbers will give you a clear picture of how your campaigns are performing.

Once you have this data, use it to optimize your efforts. If a certain type of content or channel is performing well, put more resources into it. If something isn’t working, either tweak it or cut it out altogether. The goal is to continuously improve your marketing strategy so you get better results over time.

Adding it All Up

Maximizing your marketing budget doesn’t have to be some complicated challenge that stresses you out and causes you to lose sleep at night. If we’re really going to boil it down to something simple, it’s about making sure every dollar you spend is creating value for the brand. And while you won’t hit the bullseye every time, you’ll hit the target more often than not when you utilize the tips and strategies highlighted in this article.